Tag Archives: global warming

What’s on ALEC’s polluter agenda tomorrow?

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Tomorrow, the American Legislative Exchange Council–known as ALEC–will host their 2012 Spring Task Force summit in Charlotte, NC. At tomorrow’s meeting, the corporate front group will round up its various committees and prepare to peddle new state-level legislation to attack clean energy laws, protect polluting industries, privatize education, and suppress voters, among other big business schemes.

Need a refresher on ALEC? It’s the group that brings state legislators to the table with representatives from major corporations in the sectors of energy, healthcare, tobacco, private prisons, and other groups to manipulate state politics to maximize their profits and limit their liabilities. These companies help craft template bills for state legislators to bring home and introduce in their respective statehouses.

Documents obtained and published by Common Cause now give us a roster of specific attendees at ALEC’s environmental meetings, a consortium of state legislators and a who’s who of the most offensive polluting political heavyweights including: Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Duke Energy and Peabody.  Participating legislators know well they’re walking into a dirty party, sometimes using state taxpayer money to foot the bill.

The corporations that fund ALEC are well known for their political spending on both sides of the aisle. ALEC funders include Koch Industries, known for its coordinated political spending against President Obama, and Duke Energy, which is laying down a ten million dollar line of credit to host the Democratic National Convention in their hometown of Charlotte, NC. But these polluting companies are co-conspirators under the banner of ALEC, where partisan politics are set aside to focus on the mission of destroying environmental protections, clean energy competition and liability for crimes against both people and the ecosystems sustaining us.

So what exactly are ALEC and these oil, coal, chemical and public relations companies focusing on tomorrow? Continue reading →

News from the Energy Revolution

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Blogpost by Martin Lloyd

Nesjavellir Geothermal Plant in Iceland: The station produces approximately 120MW of electrical power, and delivers around 1,800 liters (480 US gal) of hot water per second. © Steve Morgan/Greenpeace

News that the UK could be set to import volcano power from Iceland has also focused some attention on the number of high voltage interconnectors being built across Europe. So now is a good time to revist a report Greenpeace put out in 2011. ‘Battle of the Grids‘ spelled out what’s needed for an energy revolution:

  • Micro Grids – combining different types of renewable energy to power communities
  • Smart Grids – to balance power supply across cities and regions
  • Super Grids – to balance power supplies at the national level

In different places all these different pieces are now coming together.

Proposed investments like the Iceland – UK connection, or the planned investments in renewable energy in Germany and Denmark are the first steps in what we call the Energy Revolution.

So, if you want to know what’s next for the future of the world’s energy supply maybe you should take a look at the Energy Revolution report. It’s happening. Right now.

We love it when a plan comes together.

Climate Denial University? The Heartland Institute’s Toxic Presence in Higher Education

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PolluterWatch: Greenpeace Investigates Heartland Institute Leaked Documents – click to see investigation and ongoing updates.

As Greenpeace questions universities about payments to faculty members from the Heartland Institute for its campaign to discredit climate science, we have made some interesting discoveries. Our newest letter is to the University of Missouri concerning professor Anthony Lupo, who leads the schools Global Climate Change Group and is slated to receive a total $18,000 from the Heartland Institute from 2011-2012 as a consultant for “Climate Change Reconsidered” reports. As you would expect from a Heartland Institute project, these reports are designed to confuse the scientific conclusions of 97% of climate researchers around the world.

While credible climate scientists and institutions have understood global warming for decades now, Anthony Lupo’s position on climate has fluctuated significantly. A thorough article in the Kansas City Pitch back in 2008 revealed the following evolution of Dr. Lupo’s public statements on global warming:

  • In 1998, Tony Lupo boasted that climate skeptics outnumbered the consensus view that global warming is happening and caused by people, proclaiming, “there is no scientific consensus whether global warming is a fact and is occurring.” This is despite the fact that in 1995 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Dr. Lupo has participated in the IPCC as a reviewer, one of the few scientists involved who rejects the IPCC’s research conclusions.
  • In 2000, Dr. Lupo cited an influential oceanographer calling for more study on global warming in “recent statements”…after the oceanographer had been dead for nine years.
  • Continue reading →

GM drops Heartland, Coke and Pepsi drop ALEC

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UPDATE: After dropping support for ALEC, Pepsi distances itself from the Heartland Institute’s climate denial.

In the last week, we have seen some of America’s most recognizable corporate brands sever their ties to ideological front groups that demonize inconvenient science and peddle policies that are generally bad for people. Continue reading →

Koch Brothers Exposed: Fueling Climate Denial and Privatizing Democracy

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Greenpeace is partnering with Brave New Foundation to promote its newest film, Koch Brothers Exposed. Check out the movie trailer, pick up a copy of the movie and register your own local premier to help expose how Charles and David Koch’s money impacts the lives of all Americans.

The new numbers are in, ladies and gentleman: since 1997 the billionaire oil brothers Charles and David Koch have dumped just under 60 million dollars into front groups that attack climate science and policies designed to solve global warming. According to the 2010 IRS records of their private foundations, the latest year available, the Koch brothers funneled another $4.36 million into the Climate Denial Machine from their private foundations.

Despite overwhelming consensus among climate change researchers and scientific institutions worldwide—including all the Academies of Sciences in industrialized countries, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA and all other major US scientific institutions—recognition of global warming among Americans remains startlingly low. Fueled by Koch money, the Climate Denial Machine has executed an unceasing, anti-scientific and anti-regulatory public relations campaign that mirrors the tactics used by tobacco companies to deny the health consequences of smoking. Continue reading →

Heartland Institute and ALEC Partner to Pollute Classroom Science

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PolluterWatch: Greenpeace Investigates Heartland Institute Leaked Documents – click to see investigation and ongoing updates.

Perhaps the most outrageous revelation of “Denialgate,” the leak of internal Heartland Institute budget and fundraising documents detailing their 2012 work plan to obstruct global warming policy, is a project to develop school curricula to teach K-12 students that there is doubt over the causes and implications of global warming.

What hasn’t been reported is the complementary role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has peddled laws written by corporate lobbyists through state legislatures that make it easy for its dirty energy members, such as Exxon, Koch Industries and Peabody coal, to influence how climate science is presented to students. The so-called “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act,” which has been introduced in seven states and became law in at least three, would establish a state-level council to oversee all scientific material presented to students, allowing companies to smother classroom science with K street politics. This council would notably exclude anyone with environmental science credentials, instead composing itself in the following proportions:

“Section 4. {Appointment and Composition of the Council}
A. Composition: The Council shall consist of members who have expertise in the following areas in the respective proportions:
40 percent natural sciences (not environmental science)
40 percent economic sciences
20 percent educational curriculum”

Basically, it ensures that climatology will be underrepresented. Note that environmental science is interdisciplinary, open to a variety of natural science expertise in order to study complex natural systems that cannot be confined to a single topic of study. See our annotated version of the ALEC bill showing how ALEC’s language can be used to peddle global warming denial in schools. Continue reading →

Protesting Barnes and Noble’s role in deforestation

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This St. Patrick’s Day I was not particularly interested in wearing something green, or having holiday drinks with my friends. Instead, to be green. So, I dressed in orange and black, and stood outside of Barnes & Noble in Newport Beach, California to draw attention to the bookstore’s ties to illegal rainforest destruction in Indonesia.

Home of the endangered Sumatran tiger and orangutan, Indonesia’s Paradise forest is being destroyed at a break neck rate for products like toilet paper, packaging, and books. Greenpeace recently came out with a report, The Ramin Paper Trail,
linking the illegal logging of the protected ramin trees from Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) mills in Indonesia to American products like some books sold at Barnes & Noble. Continue reading →

Heartland Institute Sting Operation Triggers Greenpeace Investigations

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PolluterWatch: Greenpeace Investigates Heartland Institute Leaked Documents – click to see investigation and ongoing updates. 

What an awkward entrance into 2012 for the climate denial machine!

Among the ongoing dubious deeds of the billionaire Koch brothers, the American Petroleum Institute’s Vote 4 Energy propaganda and the House of Representative’s love affair with the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, an indicator that policymakers refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of global warming, we already had plenty of debunking to do.

Then the Heartland Institute fell on its face, inadvertently aiding in a leak of its own internal documents outlining their strategies and finances for 2012. We are currently investigating several areas those documents drew our attention to — see Greenpeace’s Heartland Institute Investigations and the Joseph Bast PolluterWatch profile.

Continue reading →

After sticking it to coal in the U.S., Rainbow Warrior sails for Amazon

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rainbow warrior sets sailIt’s never a dull day when a Greenpeace ship is in town, and that’s certainly been true for the last month.

Our flagship, the new Rainbow Warrior, sailed into port in New York City for her maiden voyage to the United States in the end of January. From there she sailed south, stopping in Baltimore to meet Greenpeace staff and activists and promote offshore wind energy before finally making her way into the belly of the beast of our Quit Coal campaign: North Carolina, where Duke Energy is headquartered.

Duke is poised to merge with Progress Energy to become the largest electric utility in the country. Its CEO, Jim Rogers, has talked profusely about how he’d like to save the climate for his grandchildren but his company’s not walking his talk. Duke is hiking its rates for North Carolina families only so that it can build more dirty coal plants. We made sure that Duke got the message that Greenpeace and North Carolina ratepayers won’t let them trash our lungs and the climate any longer.

From North Carolina, the Rainbow Warrior sailed to Florida to pay a visit to Progress Energy, the bride in the unholy marriage between two massive polluters. Continue reading →

Shell Attempts to Silence Dissent Over Arctic Drilling

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the Leiv Eiriksson Oil Rig

Do you disagree with Shell Oil’s plan to drill in the Arctic? Well, Shell is trying to silence you.

This week, the Shell Oil Company responded to Greenpeace New Zealand activists who boarded its drillship by filing a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against Greenpeace USA. Shell’s proposed order would have been one of the broadest and most restrictive in US legal history.

If granted, the restraining order could have been applied to any of the 500,000 online activists associated with Greenpeace USA who chose to take action with the organization at Shell’s gas stations, regional offices or its other venues around the country.

But, on March 1 a federal judge in Alaska rejected the bulk of the request as too broad. Instead, the judge issued a limited order against Greenpeace USA to keep us from approaching either of the drilling vessels that will be used for offshore exploratory drilling north of Alaska. Continue reading →